One Tab looks like a funnel when it’s added to your Chrome browser, and it works that way too – when you click on the icon, it funnels all of your open tabs into one web page that you can share a few different ways. You can copy and paste the URL into an email, or as a link in your chosen LMS (Learning Management System such as d2L, Moodle or Blackboard Connect to name but a few) for your classroom. You can also “Share as Web Page”, and when you click on this option, it will create a web page for you. The web page includes all of the tabs you had open in a list of individual links (you can restore your tabs individually or all at once), and also provides you with a QR code that you can easily scan with a QR Reader, as illustrated here.

When you scan the QR code with your device (I used the free iOS Quick Scan app), you’ll be brought to this page:

When you click on Open, it will look like this:

It essentially looks like the Desktop version of the web page, but is optimized for mobile browsers. You can then click on any of the links and it will bring you to the web page.

If you are signed in to your Google account while in Chrome, One Tab keeps track of each time you use it. As you can see, it will break your sessions down into timestamped subsets, so that you can go back to previous sessions if desired.

Benefits and Classroom Implications

When you use One Tab, you are saving up to 95% of your computer’s memory. As an example that is highlighted on the One Tab website, if you have 20 tabs open, you could be using around 2000 MB of memory, whereas with One Tab, you can gather everything into one tab and maybe use 100 MB of memory.

In the classroom, a teacher might have several different web pages for students to navigate to, but is unsure as to how to share them efficiently. Enter One Tab. The teacher can share the URL via email or post on a class website or LMS, or as part of a Google Doc to help with student research. And if you want a bit of novelty for the students, they can be shared via QR code.

Students can also use One Tab to share a list of their favourite websites with their peers or on their blog if they have one, or use it as a gathering page of References for a research project, as an alternative to “starring” (bookmarking) the pages. One Tab could also be used as a curation tool for students.

I have personally used One Tab to help me with the Google Certification exams. As I was taking an exam, I would open up as many tabs as I could without slowing my computer down too much, and keep track of what web pages I visited throughout the exam. This would later be kept as a record of where I looked for answers, and because One Tab keeps track of my sessions, I can go back to see my history and jog my memory in terms of what types of questions were asked.